E3 2011: Call of Duty Elite Frightens With Statistics

When I made an appointment to see Activision’s wares, I had high hopes of seeing Modern Warfare 3: The Modernest of Wars, Spiderman: Identity Crisis if I was lucky or Skylanders: That Horrible Spyro Toy Thingy ™. However, as you can tell by the title, I was treated to a 30 minute presentation on Call of Duty Elite, Project Beachhead’s maiden voyage in collaboration with Treyarch. One of the two presenters was Noah Heller, the Activision guy who pissed off Robert Bowling a few years back with some crack about how many shots it took to center mass using the blah, blah, blah rifle.

Look, I don’t mean those two guys any disrespect, but I’m not the target demographic for this kind of companion product/community service by a long shot, so it was equally a waste of my time as it was a waste of theirs. Thankfully there were 10 other poor souls in the demo room (including an industry investment analyst who expressed his disapproval of so many wasted hours by today’s lost youth), so we wasted a half an hour together in solidarity for all of the millions of hours lost to CoD in all its incarnations.

The good news first: everything we saw would be included as part of the free service – yay! So, infinite stat tracking, digital dick length comparisons and social loadout sharing is all included as part of the basic services. There will be a beta for select players using Black Ops. The service will be rolled out with full functionality along with MW3 later this year.

The bad news is that I will never use any of these features. While I could tell you all about the extreme levels of granularity they track each and every conceivable statistic with, and that they have ways to present this data to you in graphs with lovely color coding, and there’s support for hash tagged groups, Facebook and Twitter integration, etc. I won’t be able to do so with a moderate level of enthusiasm.

If you LOVE Call of Duty and you’d like to learn how to get better by learning about new weapons, loadouts, map tips, compare statistics, socialize outside of the console experience (mobile, YouTube, web) then be sure to sign up for their beta or check it out when they launch the service towards the end of the year.

Finally, they weren’t prepared to share any details about the paid version of this service other than to suggest that DLC would be a cornerstone of the offering. Thanks guys, that was newsworthy weeks before the show. Now where’s my PSP? I need to get back to playing God of War: Ghost of Sparta aka GoW:5 (seriously folks, they’ve made FIVE God of War titles).